LDCad 1.7 Alpha 1 (win+linux)

[N. W. Perry]

Favorite angles could be an interesting feature. It could be done with macro's too tough as you can assign hotkeys to macro's.

Indeed, although I think the favorites idea might be good enough to offer out of the box. (An extension of this idea might be "project parameters", where the user could select certain often-used values, like colors, rotation angles, etc. that are common to a specific model. But LDCad doesn't really work with project files, so this might be too much.)

I'll have to check but I'm fairly sure (some of) those lists are already loaded on demand. The issue is mainly caused by wxWidgets extremely slow list updates (even when you suppress screen updates), which might be addressed in one of their later builds.

The more I think about it, it seems that allowing a default setting for the file type is probably the simplest/best. In fact, I think this might have even been a planned feature at one point. And it makes sense, since LDCad is an editor, that most files created by the user will be models by default (and then maybe you could have a check box for whether to add the LDRAW_ORG qualifier).

This is mostly a LDraw format problem as the step meta indicates the END of a step so there are always (step meta count + 1) steps in a model.
The step must be counted or you wouldn't be able to navigate (back) to the last step.
Could hide it in view mode though, but not sure if that's really worth all the hassle.

Yes, or in this case, STEP meta + ROTSTEP meta + 1. Because I guess the ROTSTEP meta, what, takes the place of a STEP meta in the parser? My idea was that if a ROTSTEP meta (or even a regular STEP meta) occurs at the end of a file—i.e., has no geometry lines following it—then it could be excluded from the count, or alternately take the place of the +1. That way, the only step that wouldn't be counted is the empty extra one at the end, which is just what you'd want anyway.

I know this is a quirk of the LDraw spec, and of course you shouldn't have to re-work your program to account for its shortcomings. But then again, is the last step of a file required not to have a STEP meta, or just allowed not to? Because it seems to me that the last STEP meta of a file only indicates the end of the last step—not the existence of an additional step after it (you'd need to add at least one more part or something to imply that). But I also know that it might be a necessity of the coding process to be able to count the steps correctly.

There is a macro which does something very similar with the MLCad HIDE meta, maybe you can adapt that?

Perhaps…although the difference is that these would be lines between two metas, and I think the MLCad metas affect only single lines? I could probably figure it out, though.

Thinking about it some more, all that's really necessary would be a commenting out function. You could select some lines in the source and window and just choose "comment out" from a menu. Or, you could have it configurable, where you have a dialog that gives you the option of commenting out all lines that either follow a specific meta (such as MLCAD HIDE or MLCAD GHOST), or are between two given metas (like BUFEXCHG STORE/RETRIEVE or BUILD_MOD BEGIN/END_MOD). Basically, a bunch of boolean options.

Though I do wish that BUILD_MOD (and BUFEXCHG, for that matter) had the fallback built in, so that other tools wouldn't have to adapt to them…

That said the new LPub build mod meta are very interesting so I might support them in 1.7 beta 1/2 depending on how hard they are to implement.

I think they are definitely worth exploring, independently of whether you eventually support all of LPub's metas—which are very very many, as you know, and not all of them are of particular importance to an editing program.